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By Mark Gibbs
Network World, 03/26/01
Ever
have a few drinks with friends and start playing "what if"?
You know, what if I had gone to a different college? What if I had
married someone else? What if I had become an accountant?
The possibility that we could have done better, come off worse, been
happier, gone further, whatever, fascinates us not only when things
go wrong but also when things go right.
Now in the 15 years that Network World has been covering the
network industry, we've seen amazing changes in products and technologies
as well as radical changes in the fortunes of various companies. But
what if things had been different?
So let me buy you a drink and let's play "what if."
The way we're going to play is to start with the reality. For example,
Cisco is an amazingly successful company that knew what it was good
at. Now we go to fantasy. What if Cisco had failed to commercialize
routers or, more likely, got distracted?
There must have been a point when some executive in Cisco said: "Hey,
everyone is making out like bandits building gaming consoles, we should
be in that business!" The consequence might have been Cisco owning
that market, and Nintendo and Sega becoming also-rans.
1986: Reality — The National Science Foundation (NSF)
created NSFNET.
Fantasy — NSF didn't have enough money and NSFNET didn't
get built. This slowed the growth of the 'Net by a half dozen years
and the Internet Engineering Task Force and Internet Research Task
Force were never formed so the big dogs of the computer industry drove
the standards process. The result was that cost and limited reach
of the 'Net kept it out of the public's grasp until 2000. By then,
AOL was so powerful and ubiquitous, no one cared about the Internet
anyway.
1987: Reality — Kaypro, the king of CP/M luggables (remember
CP/M? — it came before MS-DOS), lost $19.4 million on sales of
$21.8 million. This drove the company into Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings
and a long slide into obscurity.
Fantasy — Kaypro survived this blip and went on to become
a PC manufacturing powerhouse. It was so successful that Compaq, Dell,
Gateway and others never got a chance to get big, and Kaypro today
has 80% of the PC market and all PCs look like high-tech ice chests.
1990: Reality — Microsoft ended its OS/2 development partnership
with IBM and went its own way with Windows 3.0.
Fantasy — Microsoft stuck with OS/2, failed to develop
Windows 3.0, then IBM bought Microsoft a couple of years later when
the stock price tanked. Bill Gates left after a year and went broke
trying to build electric scooters for a mass market that didn't exist.
He now lives in a small duplex in Seattle and is a cashier at Staples.
1991: Reality — Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide
Web.
Fantasy — He didn't. He created the World Wide Library
with a counterintuitive system for finding and accessing "books."
The system was quickly forgotten. Gopher was adopted instead. Nobody
really cared much about it. AOL became the de facto Internet access
tool.
1993: Reality — NCSA Mosaic for X Window, created by Marc
Andreessen and Eric Bina, was released.
Fantasy — As Berners-Lee didn't produce the World Wide
Web, forget that release. Andreessen remained in obscurity until leaving
NCSA and achieving an entry in the Guinness Book of Records for the
greatest number of body piercings.
1994: Reality — Computing power continued to grow according
to Moore's Law.
Fantasy — It didn't. By 1995 the rate of adoption of PCs
slowed to a crawl and mainframes began to re-establish their dominance
in corporate computing. A long, sullen silence fell over data processing
as glass houses expanded to accommodate the raw machinery. The Internet
was small and quiet and spam was never invented. AOL became the de
facto Internet access tool.
1997: Reality — Eric Schmidt, formerly Sun's CTO, took
over the reins at Novell. Novell became moribund a few years later.
Fantasy — Larry Ellison resigned from Oracle to run Novell
and introduced the company to the art of marketing. In 1999, Novell
performed a hostile takeover of Sun and merged with Time Warner in
2001. Ellison appeared as the cover model on the Sports Illustrated
swimsuit edition.
I could go on revising history all night (or until the bar closes),
but I'm about to run out of space. What is so intriguing is that there
were so many points in the past 15 years where any or all of the industry
could have headed off in a different direction. But of all the possible
versions of the present that we might have preferred to see, at least
in this one AOL doesn't own the Internet. Yet.
Check with me in another 15 years — we'll play "what if"
again. Next time, you get to buy the drinks. Cheers.
Related
links
Gibbs
is a man of many opinions, none of which he hesitates to share.
Reach him at nwcolumn @gibbs.com
Gibbs
Forum
The place to discuss Gibbs's columns.
Don't
forget to check out Gibbs' columns and
newsletters.
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